Just Coming Out? The Top 10 Lesbian Things You Need To Know (That No One Else Will Tell You)

If you are just coming out as a lesbian or bisexual woman or pansexual woman or queer woman, especially if you are over 35 and you have identified as heterosexual or straight for a good portion of your life and you are trying to figure out what is this new world that you are entering, I am so glad you're here. I'm Ruth Schwartz. I'm the director of the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, which is actually the global resource for lesbians and queer women and all women who love women or want to, providing information about how to date and love and have sex that you really want to be having, that the dating and love life and sex life that you want and deserve. So check us out, consciousgirlfriendacademy.com. And I am going to try to provide as much information in this video as I can about the 10 things that you really need to know about the lesbian queer women's community that nobody else might tell you. So first, I want to congratulate you and welcome you to the amazing world of women who love women. I have actually been a woman who loves women for the last 40 years, since I was 20. I'm 60 now. I have been I identify as pansexual, meaning that I have the capacity to be sexually attracted to people of various genders, but I am very homoromantic, which means I fall in love with women. And that's why I've had many relationships with women over the course of my life and have learned a lot of things, some of them the hard way. And that's a good part of why I teach what I teach, to try to shorten other people's learning curves. I think that's so important. To try to make it easier for you than it sometimes has been for me. I also have a bunch of professional credentials. I have a PhD in transpersonal psychology. I'm a certified sex and intimacy coach through the Somatica Institute, and I've been running Conscious Girlfriends since 2014. So I've had the opportunity to work with thousands of lesbians and queer women from all over the world. And so I use all of my professional and personal background in Everything I teach. So there are some very special and unique things about loving women, things that I want you to know so that you can really orient yourself to this new world and prevent unnecessary confusion and hurt, and have the kind of love and passion that you have been longing for. Here are my top ten: one. It takes huge courage to come out, to go against all the cultural programming and all the voices shouting their bad advice, as Mary Oliver says in her poem The Journey. Look it up if you haven't read it yet. To honor your deep emotional and sexual longing to be with another woman, and it's worth it. Relationships with women are deeper and more dimensional, and they can be exquisite. I often say that relationships with women between women, lesbian relationships, can be the absolute best relationships on the planet because we we can bond so deeply. We can have such incredible emotional and sexual intimacy with one another. However, item number two: Although lesbian relationships can be the best relationships on the planet. They are also more demanding. They take more skill to do well because 2 women go so much deeper. That means we can also trigger each other more deeply. And that's a lot of why I run the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, helping lesbians and queer women gain the skills you need so that you can communicate in healthy ways and work through those triggers when they come up. And learn to avoid some of the very common pitfalls that lesbians and queer women tend to fall into. Number 3, lesbian dating can be complicated for a few reasons. One is in some cases you might be interacting with a woman, you don't know if she's interested in women or not, and you don't know if this is a friend date or a date date, and you don't know how to find out. It can be different, especially if you're used to being with men, to suddenly have your dating pool and your friend pool be one and the same. And oftentimes women have trouble initiating, you know, whether it's nature or nurture. If you've been with guys, you're probably used to the guys doing the initiating. And so when you come out, it's like, well, do you wait for the other person to ask you or to indicate interest or You know, what if she doesn't? Because a lot of times 2 women are both waiting for the other woman to do that. That's a recipe sometimes for nothing happening. So I do try to really empower women to be able to take the initiative and to be able to— Especially if you find out that the other person is at least potentially interested in women, to be able to say like, hey, I'm You know, I'm really liking getting to know you, and I'm feeling like this could potentially be a dating connection or a romantic connection, and I want to check that out with you. And, you know, if you don't feel that way, no hard feelings, but, you know, just wanted to voice it. So we do a lot of practicing of that kind of thing in the Academy because it's often hard for people to do. But I want you to know it can get easier, and it's a great way to become more able to have what you want. So item number 4, just as it has taken probably a considerable amount of pain and challenge for you to get to this point of being able to come out and acknowledge your desire for other women, every other woman whom you meet in the LGBTQ+ community has also had her own journey. And we're all survivors, you know, we're all warriors for love, but sometimes you might find some of your wounds intersecting with someone else's wounds. And so the more you can cultivate curiosity for what each other person has gone through, and, you know, in some cases, if you find her wound brushing up against yours or vice versa, The, the more you cannot take it personally, the more easily you'll be able to connect and make friends and find a girlfriend too, if that's what you want. So item number 5. You might as well know upfront that some lesbians have a chip on their shoulders about bisexual women or pansexual women or women who have newly come out and not yet had relationships with women. Or not had very many relationships with women, you might encounter some lesbians that hold those things against you. And if that happens, I want to tell you on the one hand, don't take it personally. It's not personal. It's that person's fear, pain. You know, if you're not for her, Then she's not for you. You will be for someone else. Someone else will be for you. But in the meantime, I also want you to understand that the reason why some lesbians feel this way is because sometimes they may have been with bisexual or pansexual or newly out women who were just experimenting, or— You know, wanted to try on being in bed with a woman but weren't really ready to have a full relationship, or wanted to have a relationship but weren't ready to tell their family and friends. And while all of this is understandable and part of the process of coming out for most of us, it can also be really painful, especially for someone who's been out for a long time, to fall in love with someone who is more You know, in a, in an early stage of their journey, or, or maybe whose journey isn't taking them to that same destination. So tread with care. And by the way, if you are just experimenting— We all need to experiment sometimes. Please be honest. If you're, you're going out with somebody, especially if that person has more experience with women and you're just kind of trying it on, just make sure she knows that. And try not to mislead anyone. That's just kind of kindness and compassion that we all deserve. So, um, the lesbian— this is number 6— the lesbian and queer community has an incredible array of genders and gender expressions. And if you're new to this community, you might be kind of Flummoxed, or you might be flabbergasted, or you might be confused, or you might be thrilled and excited about how many different genders we have. So I'm going to make another video that goes into much more depth about all the different varieties of gender and gender expression in the lesbian queer community. But just wanted you to know we've got femmes, and we've got high femmes, and we've got butches, and we've got soft butches, and we've got studs, and we've got non-binary people. And we've got Two-Spirit people, and we've got androgynous people, and we've got people who were identified as female at birth who don't consider themselves female. And we've got people who were identified as male at birth and do consider themselves female. And you don't know by someone's genitals or by some— how someone looks what they consider themselves to be. And you don't know by how someone looks Or by their genitals, what they want to do in bed, or even whether they want to be the one to ask you out or you need to be the one to ask them out. We in the lesbian and queer community really have a tremendous diversity and creativity in our expression. So there's a lot to learn and a lot to explore and a lot to discover, and hopefully you will enjoy that process. Let's see, item— that was, I think, 6 and 7 combined. So item number 8 is that to make it even more complicated, some women who are part of the lesbian and queer community are specifically attracted only to other people on a particular place on that gender spectrum. So let's say you're femme, you might find yourself only attracted to women that are more masculine of center. That might be soft butch or butch or stud. On the other hand, you might be femme and you might be only attracted to other femmes, or you might be thinking, I don't get any of this. I'm a woman who is attracted to women. I can be attracted to all kinds of women. So whoever you are and however it works for you, I want to completely affirm that. And I just wanted to let you know that again, we do have that, that really wonderful, complex, granular diversity in our community. So a lot to learn. Now, item number 9: within some parts of the lesbian community, there's also a lot of granularity about our specific sexual roles. Or our preferred sexual roles. But as I said earlier, you can't tell by looking. So let's say somebody is sort of like, you know, wearing the men's clothes and has the kind of swagger, which I think is really hot, you know, maybe identifies as butch or non-binary or stud. The uninformed person might think, oh well, that person is going to take the quote-unquote male role in bed. Guess what? Maybe she is, maybe they are, who knows what pronoun they prefer, and maybe they're not. There's an old expression, butch in the streets, femme in the sheets. Femme in the streets, butch in the sheets. Oftentimes in the lesbian community Some people use terms like top and bottom and switch, but again, those terms can mean different things to different people. So there's really not a whole lot of way to know other than to ask. That said, I will tell you that when people say top, sometimes that means that that person likes to take the active role in sex. It might be that she likes to wear a strap-on. It might be that she likes to penetrate with her fingers. It might be that she likes to primarily satisfy her partner, and it might be that she doesn't want to be touched herself, or it might be that she does want to be touched but only in certain ways, or it might be something else. Similarly, if you identify or someone identifies as the bottom, it can be the complementary role. It might be that you are the one who likes to be penetrated or made love to. Or it could be you're like 30% bottom, 70% top, or 40/60, or 25/75. And the closer you are to 50/50, the more likely you are to identify as a switch. Many lesbians are switches to some extent, meaning they like to both be made love to and make love to, to our partners. And again, this is the kind of thing that you get to try on and explore and discover and learn about yourself in the wonderful world of lesbians and queer women, women loving women, because in the straight world, it tends to be not 100%, of course, but it tends to be just assumed that the man is going to take the active role, the woman is going to take the receptive role. There's Sometimes there's going to be more switching and sometimes not. So I love in our community that we get to go beyond those scripts and that kind of default programming. You have a tremendous opportunity in this community to discover who you really are and how things really work for you. And it may not be static. It's likely to be dynamic. It may be ever-evolving. That's how it is for a lot of us, certainly me included. And that's a really wonderful thing about being alive. But it can also sometimes be a little challenging because straight people tend to know what is going to happen in the bedroom. I mean, that can be kind of boring, right? But it can also be kind of comforting. It's like, okay, well, the guy's going to do this for a while to the woman, and then this is going to happen, and then this is going to happen, and then this is going to happen. And this is how you're going to know when you're done. And between 2 women, there may not be any script. I mean, if you like scripts, you can develop a particular script between you and another person, but there is no default script. So that is potentially challenging, but as I said, also really potentially liberatory, and studies do show that lesbians have more orgasms. in lesbian sex. So you may have that to look forward to. Now my item number 10 of the top 10 things I wanted you to know is that if you don't yet know any of these kinds of granular things that I'm saying you will have the opportunity to get to know as a lesbian or queer woman, there's nothing wrong with you. Most of us, until we come out or have really, really open partners of whatever gender, don't get to learn or even inquire into these kinds of things within ourselves. We don't, we don't know what's on the menu. Nobody handed us the menu. You know, it's more like you sat down at the table and the waitperson came and just plopped the plate down in front of you. That's, that's how heterosexual life is for many women. You may have been a more empowered heterosexual woman like that than that, but that's often how it is. And so lesbian and queer life might feel like you've suddenly been handed The Chinese restaurant menu, which goes on for pages and pages and pages. And if you're really hungry, you might think, I don't want to read this whole damn menu, just bring me something. But over time, I think that you will come to enjoy and really appreciate the freedom that is available to you in, in our wonderful world of women loving women. So I'm so glad you're here, so glad you're queer, and, and there's a whole lot of resources and a whole lot of learning and support and community available for you in the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, should you choose to want it. And I hope you will, because we're a really amazing group of women coming together to talk about and learn about What it really takes to have the kind of happy, healthy, lasting love relationship that so many of us want. So if that sounds good to you, check us out, consciousgirlfriendacademy.com, and I'll see you there. Lots of love.